There is no plot, not in the accepted sense; rather, the novel is a Frankenstein’s monster made of wildly disparate story lines bolted together with the clumsiest spanner the author could find. The result is a dark fantasy along the lines of “Gormenghast,” of a Sadeian romp without the romping sex, and of tennis-inflected films such as “Strangers on a Train” and “Match Point.”
The main characters are Maja Ocholowska, a beautiful but wayward ingénue; Cholawicki, her on-again-off-again fiancé; and Marian Walczak, a male tennis coach to whom Maja is said to bear a striking physical resemblance, and for whom she develops a curious, half-demented passion that soars and sinks with baffling and ultimately irritating volatility.
After a few chapters Walczak’s name is changed to Leszczuk because, as a footnote from the tabloid’s editors informs us, there turned out to be a real tennis coach called Walczak. “What a strange coincidence!” the footnote merrily remarks. No doubt this intrusion of real life into a fictional world appealed to Gombrowicz’s anarchic attitude toward artistic decorum — or, as he might say, the contamination of Form by Chaos.
The central setting of the novel is an ancient castle in the depths of a forest, the ancestral home of an old prince who lost his wits after the disappearance of his illegitimate son. There is a great deal of madness in this novel. At the heart of the castle we find, needless to say, an “evil chamber,” which is in fact “the old kitchen.” Anyone who spends a night in this room is reduced to a gibbering wreck. And what is the thing in the kitchen that most terrifies? It is a towel, “gray with dust, hanging on an old iron peg,” which quivers ceaselessly — and “it was taut.”
Honestly, I am not making this up.
At this level the book is a mildly entertaining if somewhat wearying spoof on the Gothic novel. However, the author’s main preoccupation is not bats and bumps in the night, but … tennis. Match after match is described in detail, rally by rally, in prose any sportswriter would be proud of. The game is a stylized metaphor for the love match, or mismatch, between Maja, Cholawicki and Leszczuk. Meanwhile, Skolinski, an itinerant professor, is trying to get his hands on the castle’s priceless but neglected artworks, which ——
